The present relates to a device for controlling at least one cut in an inner liner for a group of cigarettes on a cigarette packaging machine.
When packaging cigarettes in flip-lid packets, the cigarettes are wrapped in an inner wrapping, the so-called inner liner, and the flip-lid packet is wrapped around said wrapped group of cigarettes by the packaging machine.
The inner liner can consist of printed paper, metallized paper or other suitable, strip-shaped materials. These materials are drawn off at the packaging machine from a bobbin and cut to the appropriate length. Before the inner liner is wrapped around the cigarettes, the inner liner is often subjected to impressing, printing or other processing. One of these possible processing steps is to deliberately cut into the inner liner to create desired separation points which allow the smoker, when opening the packet for the first time, to tear out a section of the inner liner in the area of this opening and thus reach the cigarettes.
If these cuts in the inner liner are not carried out properly, then access to the cigarettes is made more difficult and it is no longer possible to easily remove the packaging from around the cigarettes.
Hitherto, these cuts in the inner liner have not been controlled, rather it has only been established from test samples of finished cigarette packets that the inner liner has not been correctly cut. The machine then has to be re-adjusted and the cigarette packets having an incorrectly cut inner liner are disposed of and not released into the market.
Since several thousand defective cigarette packets are often manufactured until, by random sampling, a defective cigarette packet has been detected, a technique has been sought to verify on-line, i.e. while the cigarettes are packaged, that the cuts in the inner liner are correct.